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5. Challenging Cultural Encapsulation in the Shared Parish
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>> 175 5 Challenging Cultural Encapsulation in the Shared Parish Challenging Cultural Encapsulation In November of my parish year at All Saints, I attended a civic event sponsored by the city government of Havenville. This “community dialogue ” gathered several dozen people from the different cultural groups in town. They came together one evening at the local college campus, everyone seated in plastic chairs facing a lectern. The event began with a short speech by a white-bearded city councilman wearing an oxygen tube. On behalf of the mayor and city council, he greeted us and offered a brief history and appreciation of the city’s cultural diversity. The dialogue then began in earnest. The chairperson, a middle-aged white woman, separated us into cultural groups—European American, Mexican , Central American and Caribbean, South American, and Russian/ Ukrainian. We discussed in these groups what we liked about Havenville , what helped us feel comfortable, and what difficulties we had encountered in feeling welcome there. Then we returned to share with the larger group what had happened in our small groups. During that large group conversation, the fault lines of intercultural life in Havenville became visible. While the European American group told pleasant stories about life in Havenville, the other groups brought forward tales of discrimination, alienation, and difficulty finding work. The community dialogue meeting constituted one of the few events I attended in Havenville where people from different cultural groups congregated and shared their diverging stories. On the one hand, it provided an opportunity for a civic leader to publicly offer an inclusive vision of multiculturalism, what I will call in this chapter a “folk 176 > 177 despite the fact that the percentage of the U.S. population born outside the country is less than it was a century ago. According to decennial census figures, the foreign-born population of the United States peaked in 1890 and 1910 with 14.8 percent and 14.7 percent of the population respectively. According to the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS), the current foreign-born population of the United States is 12.9 percent. But contemporary immigration patterns indicate a broader cultural and racial diversity than ever before. In 1910, 87.2 percent of the foreign-born were from Europe and most of the rest (9 percent) from Canada. According to the 2010 ACS, 12.1 percent of today’s immigrants come from Europe, 28.2 percent from Asia, 4.0 percent from Africa, 0.5 percent from Oceania, and 53.1 percent from Latin America. * * * At the community dialogue meeting back in Havenville, I had listened to the city councilman acknowledge his own family’s immigrant heritage and the tenacity with which they had held to their culture of origin. He reported that they had spoken German for six generations at home. He then made reference to contemporary immigrants in Havenville, mentioning the Latino, Russian, and Japanese communities .2 He concluded his welcome by reminding everyone that this influx of newcomers was part of the tremendous growth of the city in recent years, implicitly asking people for patience as everyone adjusted to the changes. After he finished painting this portrait of multiculturalism in Havenville, I joined the European American group as they met apart from the other cultural groups. The tone of the discussion within that group remained very positive throughout. Members of the group become quite animated talking about the positive and welcoming spirit of the town. They highlighted the willingness of Havenvillers to volunteer, and people noted how the college and the city had really come together over the last few years. Though the instructions for the dialogue had asked us to talk about people’s experience of welcome or the lack thereof upon moving to Havenville, the facilitator of the group allowed the focus to shift to general city problems. People spoke of traffic and crowded schools. Finally, one woman in her sixties, a parishioner at All Saints, got up and bluntly noted that “there is hatred 178 > 179 dilemmas of a culturally diverse environment with asymmetrical power dynamics. The structure of the evening—a combination of conversation in distinct cultural groups along with large group conversation based on the group reports—lent itself to a safe expression of the tensions in the city. People spoke of racism, unemployment, linguistic discrimination , and a lack of legal papers. The Russian and Ukrainian group unhappily compared themselves to the Latinos with their greater access to resources in Spanish. All of these concerns came as...